Former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman is under fire from Congress for his agency's targeting of Tea Party and other conservative organizations. Shulman himself is under suspicion for his numerous visits to the White House compared to other administration officials. Additionally, Shulman's wife Susan L. Anderson reportedly works for the Washington D.C. based liberal organization Public Campaign.

Anderson's group, Public Campaign, describes itself as, "a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to sweeping campaign reform that aims to dramatically reduce the role of big special interest money in American politics."

(The article goes on at the link to publish many of her tweets during the campaign. "If Romney loses the election, I bet he can file an amended return and claim the deductions he didn't claim.”", "Romney in class by himself - see @SunFoundation charts comparing Romney's tax returns to other presidents. ", "Folks go to Caymans to dodge taxes or dive reefs - wanna bet what Mitt was doing there?")

During a Congressional hearing, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) questioned Shulman if he knew how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had information in supporting a July 2012 claim that Romney had not paid taxes for the last ten years. Shulman appeared not to know how or why Senator Reid made such a claim.

The whole point of Watergate was that not even the most powerful government official is above the law. The first specified charge in Article II of the Articles of Impeachment alleged that Nixon, "acting personally and through his subordinates," violated the rights of citizens by causing "income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."

"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard againstabsurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is thesport of every wind." --Thomas Jefferson

Editorial Exegesis

"A clue as to whether the targeting by the IRS of Tea Party and otherconservative groups was discussed at the 157 meetings that former IRSCommissioner Douglas Shulman had at the White House may be found inremarks by Stephanie Cutter, deputy manager for President Obama's 2012reelection campaign, in a recent appearance on Jake Tapper's show 'TheLead' on CNN. ... Cutter attempted to dismiss charges they werepolitical meetings but admitted she had attended meetings with Shulmanat the White House. ... Well, if they were not political meetings, whywas she there at all? Was she there to offer her health care or tax codeexpertise? ... When she appeared on CBS' 'Face the Nation' to defend thepresident's new campaign slogan 'Romnesia,' she went on to say thatRepublican nominee Mitt Romney was 'severely conservative' and had runas the 'ideal' Tea Party candidate. She said this as she was sitting inmeetings with the head of an IRS that was charged with implementation ofObamaCare as it was targeting groups that were created to opposeObamaCare. Though she denies it, Cutter was also deeply involved in theads run by the pro-Obama super-PAC Priorities USA in which steelworkerJoe Soptic recounted how his wife died of cancer after he lost hishealth insurance when his plant was shuttered after a takeover by BainCapital and other companies working with Romney's private equity firm.... Cutter should be called to testify under oath before the HouseOversight Committee to explain why a key Obama campaign operative was inon meetings to discuss ObamaCare implementation with an IRS officialwhose agency was targeting groups opposed to it." --Investor's BusinessDaily

Did the Internal Revenue Service scandal begin when the Obama administrationaggressively tried to deny tax-exempt status to pro-Israeli groups that fundedsettlements on the West Bank in defiance of its wishes? The IRS seems to have usedtax audits to try to cripple these Jewish groups. When the Citizens United decisioncame down, did President Obama turn the guns focused on the conservative Jewishgroups to fire on Republican political organizations?

The Washington Free Beacon reports that the idea of using the IRS to underminesettlement activity surfaced barely two months after Obama took office.

The next day, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which hasenjoyed warm relations with the president, asked the IRS to investigate groups"allegedly raising funds for the development of illegal settlements in the occupiedWest Bank."

Meanwhile, Arab pressure to audit the settlement groups escalated. In October 2009,a cable revealed by WikiLeaks recounted a meeting between the chief negotiator forthe former Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and U.S. Consul General DanielRubinstein. The cable noted that Qurei gave

Rubinstein "a copy of an article ... in Israeli daily Haaretz newspaper on August17, entitled 'American Non-profit Organization Raises Funds for Settlement' andasked the US to review the situation with an eye toward eliminating organizations'tax exempt status if they are funding settlement activity."

The Free Beacon notes that the following week, J Street, a pro-Palestinian lobbyinggroup, also demanded an investigation into U.S. charities that contribute tosettlements.

HaYovel, a group that sends volunteers to work in West Bank vineyards, was the firstto be audited, six months after its role was prominently featured in a New YorkTimes article. The Times quoted a senior State Department administration officialcalling such groups "a problem" and "unhelpful to the efforts that we're trying tomake." It was the first of many Jewish pro-settlement groups to experience IRSaudits.

When the Citizens United decision came down, outraging the Obama administration, theIRS already had begun to use the agency's power to audit and intimidate Jewishgroups promoting West Bank settlements. The idea of using the same M.O. to go aftertax-exempt groups that sprang up in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision likelywas another fruit of the same tree.

Was the president personally involved? The numerous visits to the White House byActing IRS Director Douglas Shulman -- including four personal meetings with thepresident -- in a two-year period after the court ruling bear further scrutiny. Bycomparison, the Bush 43 IRS director visited the building only once in his tenure.

Schulman's meetings with White House staff may have focused on the IRS's role inadministering ObamaCare, but the chances that the audit of conservative groups wasdiscussed cannot be ruled out, especially in view of the work of Schulman's wife,Susan L. Anderson.

Anderson works for Public Campaign, an organization "dedicated to sweeping campaignreform that aims to dramatically reduce the role of big special interest money inAmerican politics" and funded by groups like Health Care for America Now!

Anderson, who supported the Occupy Wall Street campaign, appears to have occupiedthe IRS through her husband. According to Breitbart.com, Anderson's tweets indicatethat she worked for Obama and had an obsession with cutting Karl Rove's Crossroadsgroup down to size.

On June 20, 2012, for example, she tweeted "Karl Rove Crossroads get money out," andappealed to supporters to come to a demonstration to "CONFRONT Karl Rove plusAmerican Crossroads REBUILD THE AMERICAN DREAM."

Anderson's activities and Schulman's White House visits need further congressionalscrutiny. Who knows where it might lead?

Are these not marching orders to the public employee union activists working in the Obama administration agencies?

Kim Strassel, WSJ today, excerpt, link below... Aug. 9, 2010: In Texas, President Obama for the first time publicly names a group he is obsessed with—Americans for Prosperity (founded by the Koch Brothers)—and warns about conservative groups. Taking up a cry that had until then largely been confined to left-wing media and activists, he says: "Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Aug. 21: Mr. Obama devotes his weekly radio address to the threat of "attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don't know who's behind these ads and we don't know who's paying for them. . . . You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation. . . . The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide."

Week of Aug. 23: The New Yorker's Jane Mayer authors a hit piece on the Koch brothers, entitled "Covert Operations," in which she accuses them of funding "political front groups." The piece repeats the White House theme, with Ms. Mayer claiming the Kochs have created "slippery organizations with generic-sounding names" that have "made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington."

Aug. 27: White House economist Austan Goolsbee, in a background briefing with reporters, accuses Koch industries of being a pass-through entity that does "not pay corporate income tax." The Treasury inspector general investigates how it is that Mr. Goolsbee might have confidential tax information. The report has never been released.

This same week, the Democratic Party files a complaint with the IRS claiming the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is violating its tax-exempt status.

Sept. 2: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warns on its website that the Kochs have "funneled their money into right-wing shadow groups."

Sept. 16: Mr. Obama, in Connecticut, repeats that a "foreign-controlled entity" might be funding "millions of dollars of attack ads." Four days later, in Philadelphia, he again says the problem is that "nobody knows" who is behind conservative groups.

Sept. 21: Sam Stein, in his Huffington Post article "Obama, Dems Try to Make Shadowy Conservative Groups a Problem for Conservatives," writes that a "senior administration official" had "urged a small gathering of reporters to start writing on what he deemed 'the most insidious power grab that we have seen in a very long time.' "

Sept. 22: In New York City, Mr. Obama warns that conservative groups "pose as non-for-profit, social welfare and trade groups," even though they are "guided by seasoned Republican political operatives" who might be funded by a "foreign-controlled corporation."

Sept. 26: On ABC's "This Week," Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declares outright that the "benign-sounding Americans for Prosperity, the American Crossroads Fund" are "front groups for foreign-controlled companies."

On Oct. 14, Mr. Obama calls these groups "a problem for democracy." On Oct. 22, he slams those who "hide behind these front groups." On Oct. 25, he upgrades them to a "threat to our democracy." On Oct. 26, he decries groups engaged in "unsupervised spending."

These were not off-the-cuff remarks. They were repeated by the White House and echoed by its allies in campaign events, emails, social media and TV ads. The president of the United States spent months warning the country that "shadowy," conservative "front" groups—"posing" as tax-exempt entities and illegally controlled by "foreign" players—were engaged in "unsupervised" spending that posed a "threat" to democracy. Yet we are to believe that a few rogue IRS employees just happened during that time to begin systematically targeting conservative groups? A mere coincidence that among the things the IRS demanded of these groups were "copies of any contracts with and training materials provided by Americans for Prosperity"?

Yes, it is more than an IRS scandal, more than election interference, and more than an attack on the rule of law. The tax law itself is what armed the IRS to wage their war - against free speech, against free assembly and against equal protection for targeted groups.

Due to time constraints, I must write this as an unedited stream of consciousness. My apologies for the roughness.

Michael Hastings was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles. The single car accident happened at about 0425. He crashed into a tree and was burned beyond recognition. He was 33.

Mr. Hastings was the war correspondent whose Rolling Stone article led to the firing of General Stanley McChrystal, who at the time was the top General in Afghanistan.

Although Hastings was widely read, no serious war correspondents took him seriously, or at least not the ones I know. He did, however, accurately portray my words and context in his book “The Operators.” Hastings was like an undisciplined hitman with a pen and license to kill. One of his gonzo articles damaged the career and reputation of Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell, for no cause. My sense was that he picked fights with key people mostly to draw attention. Though Hastings was not respected among war correspondents, it is sad to see a man die so young so horribly. Just why he crashed into a tree at 0425 remains unknown. No doubt the conspiracies will begin to fly.

Case Closed? Far From It.The FBI seems blasé about the IRS investigation, so it's crucial Congress make it a priority.

By PEGGY NOONAN

Right now the IRS story looks stalled and confused. Congressional investigators are asking for documents—"The IRS is being a little slow," said a staffer—and interviewing workers. Pieces of testimony are being released and leaked, which has allowed one congressman, Democrat Elijah Cummings, to claim there's actually no need for an investigation, the story's over, the mystery solved.

When the scandal broke in early May, the Obama administration vowed to get to the bottom of it with an FBI investigation. Many of us were skeptical. There's a sign we were right.

Enlarge ImageimageimageAssociated Press

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings.

On June 13, FBI Robert Director Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee and was questioned by Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) about former tax-exempt office chief Lois Lerner's claim that the targeting of conservative groups was due to the incompetence of workers in the Cincinnati office.

Jordan: "What can you tell us—I mean you started a month ago, what can you tell us about this, have you found . . . the now-infamous two rogue agents, have you discovered who those people are?"

Mueller: "Needless to say, because it is under investigation, I can't give out any of the details."

Mueller: "Ah, may be able to do that, but I'd have to get back to you."

Jordan: "Can you tell me who the lead investigator is?"

Mueller: "Off the top of my head, no."

Jordan: "This is the most important issue in front of the country in the last six weeks, you don't know who's heading up the case, who the lead investigator is?"

Mueller: "Ah, at this juncture, no. . . . I have not had a recent briefing on it."

Jordan: "Do you know if you've talked to any of the victims—have you talked to any of the groups who were targeted by their government—have you met with any of the tea-party folks since May 14, 2013?"

Mueller: "I don't know what the status of the interviews are by the team that's on it."

Wow. He'd probably know something about the FBI's investigation of the IRS if he cared about it, if it had some priority or importance within his agency. This week an embarrassed Mr. Mueller was ready for questions from senators. There is an investigation, he said, and "over a dozen" agents have been assigned. Well, better than nothing.

Attorneys for the best-known of the targeted groups confirm that they've heard nothing. From the American Center for Law and Justice: "None of our clients have been contacted or interviewed by the FBI." From lawyer Cleta Mitchell: "I hear from people around the country, and no one has been contacted." All of which is strange. If the FBI were investigating a series of muggings, you'd hope they'd start by interviewing the people who'd been mugged.

Meanwhile a CNN poll shows the number of people who believe the targeting program was directed by the White House is up 10 points the past month, to 47%.

So things have gotten pretty confused, maybe because it's in the interest of a lot of people to confuse it.

Again, what is historic about this scandal, what makes it unique and uniquely dangerous, is that it is different in kind from previous IRS scandals. In the past it was always elite versus elite, power guys using the agency against other power guys. This scandal is different because it's the elite versus the people. It is an entrenched and fearsome power versus regular citizens.

The scandal broke, of course, when Lois Lerner deviously planted a question at a Washington conference. She was trying to get out ahead of a forthcoming inspector general's report that would reveal the targeting. She said that "our line people in Cincinnati who handled the applications" used "wrong" methods. Also "in some cases, cases sat around for a while." The Cincinnati workers "sent some letters out that were far too broad," in some cases even asking for contributors' names. "That's not appropriate."

Since that day, the question has been: Was the targeting of conservative groups in fact the work of incompetent staffers in Cincinnati, or were higher-ups in the Washington office of the IRS involved? Ms. Lerner said it was all Cincinnati.

But then the information cascade began. The Washington Post interviewed Cincinnati IRS workers who said everything came from the top. The Wall Street Journal reported congressional investigators had been told by the workers that they had been directed from Washington. Word came that one applicant group, after receiving lengthy and intrusive requests for additional information, including donor names, received yet another letter asking for even more information—signed by Lois Lerner.

Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, which sought tax-exempt status, recently came into possession of a copy of a 20-month-old letter from the IRS's Taxpayer Advocate Service in Houston, acknowledging that her case had been assigned to an agent in Cincinnati. "He is waiting for a determination from their office in Washington," the advocate said. The agent was "unable to give us a timeframe" on when determination would be made.

The evidence is overwhelming that the Washington office of the IRS was involved. But who in Washington? How high did it go, how many were involved, how exactly did they operate?

Those are the questions that remain to be answered. That's what the investigations are about.

Rep. Cummings, having declared the mystery solved, this week released the entire 205-page transcript of an interview between congressional investigators and a frontline manager in the Cincinnati office. The manager, a self-described conservative Republican, was asked: "Do you have any reason to believe that anyone in the White House was involved in the decision to screen Tea Party cases?" The answer: "I have no reason to believe that."

There, said Mr. Cummings, case closed. But that testimony settles nothing. Nobody imagines the White House picked up a phone to tell IRS workers in Cincinnati to target their enemies. That, as they say, is not how it's done.

The frontline manager also said, in his interview, "I'll say my realm was so low down, and after the initial review of a case, which was, you know, within three days after assignment, I became less and less aware of what happened above me." He said he didn't do any targeting, but "I'm not in a position to discuss anybody else's intention but my own."

What investigators have to do now is follow the trail through the IRS in Washington, including political appointees.

Questions: Do the investigators have a list of everyone who worked in the executive office of the IRS commissioner? Have they contacted those people and asked when they learned of the targeting? What did they do when they learned? Who, if anyone, thwarted any attempts to stop it? And what about those bonuses the IRS is reportedly about to award its employees? How does that figure in?

Congress, including both its battling investigative committees, must get the answers to these questions.

The House speaker should make sure it's a priority. There's no sign the FBI will.

The big story was that some obscure state Senator from Illinois was among those under surveillance. Not mentioned is that he had known links to terrorists.

He was looked at (allegedly), not charged or apprehended.

My view of the Patriot Act is that if my number is found in the speed dial or call log of a terrorist, even by mis-dial, I expect to be looked at until cleared. Same Senator kicked off his political campaign (allegedly) in the living room of an unrepentant terrorist.

Young journalist Eliana Johnson keeps some coverage of this story alive as our attention disorder mainstream keeps moving on to other topics. At the moment this is a lead opinion piece at WSJ, Powerline, Real Clear Politics and National Review.

The IRS's Best Friend in CongressRep. Elijah Cummings says the House investigation is a 'witch hunt.' Yet revealing evidence keeps coming.

By ELIANA JOHNSON

The House Oversight Committee's investigation into the Internal Revenue Service's discrimination against conservative groups continues—but at least one unenthusiastic member seems to think the committee's work is done.

Over the objections of Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) last week released online the full, 205-page transcript of an interview that committee investigators conducted with an IRS employee in Cincinnati named John Shafer. Mr. Cummings explained that he was compelled to release the Shafer transcript because it explodes Mr. Issa's "conspiracy theories"—chiefly, that the White House played a role in the targeting of conservative groups, and that it was orchestrated out of IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C. In fact, Mr. Issa has never said the former, and much that is known so far about the IRS scandal suggests that the Washington connection is substantial.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (right) and Acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, June 6.

Mr. Cummings's enthusiasm for defending the IRS may make him a lonely figure among the 22 Republicans and 16 Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, but he is likely to find an ally in his chief counsel on the committee. She is Susanne Sachsman Grooms, who worked for the IRS between 2008 and 2011 as an adviser to the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement and then as a senior counselor to the chief of criminal investigations. At the time, the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement—her boss—was none other than Steven Miller, who held the post of IRS commissioner from November 2012 until his resignation in May after the scandal broke. Mr. Cummings also has a strong tie to the Obama administration: His staff director on the Oversight Committee, David Rapallo, is a former White House lawyer.

The release of the Shafer transcript came after a June 12 interview with Politico in which Mr. Cummings labeled the Oversight Committee's investigation a "witch hunt"—in other words, something that should end immediately. A few days before that, in a June 9 CNN interview, he said, "The IG made some recommendations, those recommendations are being adopted by the IRS . . . I think we're in great shape."

As it happens, the revelation of Mr. Shafer's testimony isn't likely to discourage the investigation.

Mr. Shafer, the manager of an IRS screening group in the Cincinnati office, told committee investigators that in February 2010 one of his employees brought a tea-party application for nonprofit designation to his attention.

Given the media coverage that the tea party was receiving, Mr. Shafer deemed the application a "high profile" matter and alerted his managers to its existence. Shortly thereafter, according to his testimony, lawyers in the IRS's Washington, D.C., office said, "We want to look at the case." On the evidence of the Washington office's interest in that initial case, Mr. Shafer said IRS agents in Cincinnati then held the applications of tea-party groups until they were given "further direction" from D.C.

Case closed, according to Mr. Cummings, who wrote in a letter to Mr. Issa: "These statements by the screening group manager appear to directly contradict your allegations of political motivation."

If Mr. Shafer or Mr. Cummings could read the minds of IRS officials in Washington, that might be true. In reality, Mr. Shafer was unable to say why officials in Washington were so interested in the tea-party cases or whether the officials' interest was politically motivated.

"Did you have an understanding at the time about what the reason was for sending the cases [to Washington] for review?" investigators asked him. "No," he responded. They pressed further. "Do you have personal knowledge of the motivations of Washington and how they worked the tea party cases?" "I do not," Mr. Shafer said.

The testimony offered by other Cincinnati IRS employees—which I have reviewed in full, un-redacted form—contradicts Mr. Cummings's claims and those of Obama administration officials, such as White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who has pointed the finger at "line employees" in Cincinnati. The IRS interviews suggest that the agency's officials in Washington closely controlled the review of tea-party cases.

Consider Gary Muthert, the Cincinnati IRS screener who told investigators that he began singling out tea-party applications at the request of Mr. Shafer, who told him "Washington, D.C., wanted some cases."

And there is Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati IRS agent who for several months in 2010 was charged with handling all tea-party applications. She told the committee that she understood the "lookout list" used to flag the applications of tea-party groups was also intended to flag those of Republican and conservative groups. When the applications of liberal groups came in, she sent them along for general processing.

Ms. Hofacre also told the committee's investigators that IRS lawyers in Washington were controlling her every move. "I was taking all my direction from EO Technical," she told investigators, referring to the group of IRS tax lawyers in Washington that handles tax-exempt organizations. She went on to say that she had "no autonomy" in her handling of the cases, and she termed the behavior of IRS officials in Washington in the matter "very unusual."

Mr. Cummings's efforts have drawn attention away from these troubling accounts, which have been partially released by the House Oversight Committee—and instead bogged the committee down with questions of whether to release full interview transcripts.

Mr. Issa opposes releasing the full transcripts. Disclosing them, he says, threatens to compromise the investigation by providing future witnesses a "road map" of the scope and content of likely questions. It also provides them with time to formulate their answers and to ensure that their testimony corroborates that of other witnesses. Mr. Cummings, who has already made his position clear by unilaterally releasing the Shafer transcript, has called the committee chairman's position on the matter "bulls---."

Many questions remain for the committee to address, even if Mr. Cummings might disagree. Who at the IRS, for instance, developed the intrusive and exhaustive questions that were sent to the tea-party groups? Why did so many of those groups have to wait years for their applications to be processed, and why are many more still waiting? Who specifically were the IRS officials in Washington directing the Cincinnati agents targeting the tea-party organizations?

If the House Oversight Committee can overlook the distractions thrown up by one of its members, the answers may prove illuminating about the way Washington has worked during the Obama administration.

Is America’s lawyer president lying to the world?Robert Hutchinson | 4 July 2013

What the Edward Snowden affair has revealed, more than anything else, is the insanity of electing lawyers to higher office. That’s because too often lawyers take advantage of the inherent ambiguity of natural language to deliberately mislead people.

Or, as Bill Clinton famously put it, it all depends what the meaning of “is” is.

Thinking like a lawyer, Bill Clinton looked the American people in the eye and said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” Monica Lewinsky, because, you see, oral sex isn’t legally “sex,” at least that’s how Clinton understood it.

Clinton also said that “there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship” with the barely legal intern. This was truthful, Clinton later argued, because he said it in the present tense – “it depends what the meaning of is is” – and the reality was that he had an improper relationship in the past, you see, but not now.

Oh, how clever. Fooled us there, Mr. President!

Now we may be going through the same legal word games once again with another Lawyer-President, Barack Obama. On June 7, Obama went on national TV and told the American people that “nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” A day later, he told Charlie Rose:

“What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls … by law and by rule, and unless they … go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it's always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause.”

The GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent, said the same thing. He told CNN that the NSA “is not listening to Americans' phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law.”

Like Bill Clinton, Obama, Rogers and the whole national security crowd must think they are being so clever... because, you see, no one is listening to your phone calls... but in all likelihood the NSA is simply recording them all.

The “tin foil hat” crowd, otherwise known as people who don’t swallow whole what the government and their lackeys in the mainstream media tell us, have long suspected that the NSA now has the technical capability to record every telephone call, email and instant message on earth... and simply store it all in giant hard drives for later analysis.

James Bamford’s famous 2012 article in Wired magazine about the NSA’s new mammoth spy center in Utah basically revealed this. Bamford wrote:

“[F]or the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration, the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.”

The suspicion that the NSA is actually recording all telephone calls was strengthened during the Boston Marathon bombing case when a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, Tim Clemente, let slip that government investigators were able to go back, after the bombing, and somehow listen to telephone conversations between the bombers and some of their friends.

But if the Boston Marathon bombers weren’t under police surveillance, and even the government admits they weren’t... how were investigators able to tap into the telephone calls they had in the past?

Answer: Because it’s likely that all cell phone, and perhaps all land line calls in the United States and overseas are being recorded. All of them.

So when Barack Obama tells the American people that “no one is listening to your phone calls,” it could very well be that he’s being legally accurate... but could still be lying through his teeth. He’s being deliberately deceptive... just as James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, was being deliberately deceptive when he told Congress that it is NOT true that the NSA is collecting data on millions of Americans. (If any ordinary citizen perjured himself in testimony before Congress, he or she would be rotting in jail... no matter how many excuses they might have.)

It all depends what the meaning of “is” is, you see.

As for Obama’s claim that the NSA has to “go to a judge [and] show probable cause” before it can listen to Americans’ phone calls, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a liberal New York Democrat, claimed that’s simply not true.

After attending a top secret briefing on the NSA on June 14, Nadler said he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.” Nadler later backtracked on his allegation when it caused embarrassment to the White House but documents released by The Guardiannewspaper confirmed his original account.

So, the next bombshell that Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and The Guardian newspaper are going to release is likely to be the revelation that the NSA is recording all of our phone calls.

On June 28, Glenn Greenwald gave a talk via Skype to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago, and he revealed that Snowden has documents that prove all Americans’ cell phone calls are being recorded and stored. Here’s a transcription from a blogger of what he said:

“Another document that I probably shouldn't but - since it's not published - but I am going to anyway share with you - and this one is coming soon - but you are getting a little preview. It talks about how a brand new technology enables the National Security Agency to direct, redirect into its own repositories, one billion cellphone calls every single day, one billion cellphone calls every single day.

“What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it’s being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency. It doesn't mean they are listening to every call, it means they are storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time. And it does mean that they are collecting millions upon millions upon millions of our phone and email records.

“It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy. And what is incredibly menacing about it is that it is all talking place in the dark, with no accountability and virtually no safeguards.”

You heard it here first, folks.

As this drama unfolds, the public has to remember that many of the key players are, like Barack Obama, lawyers. They are attempting to defuse growing public outrage by playing word games.

It could well turn out that the NSA isn’t “listening” to all of our cell and telephone phone calls... it’s just recording them all so future investigators can, at any time, listen to them. For those who cherish constitutional government and the rule of law, that’s cold comfort indeed.

Robert Hutchinson is a writer and the author, most recently, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible. He blogs at RobertHutchinson.com.

George Will today: Although the Constitution has no Article VIII, the administration acts as though there is one that reads: “Notwithstanding all that stuff in other articles about how laws are made, if a president finds a law politically inconvenient, he can simply post on the White House Web site a notice saying: Never mind.”

Never mind that the law stipulates 2014 as the year when employers with 50 full-time workers are mandated to offer them health-care coverage or pay fines. Instead, 2015 will be the year. Unless Democrats see a presidential election coming.--------------------------------

Hey Obama – why couldn’t a Republican President delay all of Obamacare for 10,000 years?

As the Obamacare law is written, the employer mandate is to begin in January 2014. This is what the law said when it was passed by the House and Senate, and signed by President Obama in 2010.

However, it has been reported that President Obama has just delayed the employer mandate part of Obamacare until January 2015. Obama did this without approval from Congress.

It was Obama himself who delayed part of Obamacare for one year. If Obama can do this, I would love to hear him explain why a Republican President could not delay all of Obamacare for 10,000 years.http://danfromsquirrelhill.wordpress.com/

The murder case against George Zimmerman is rapidly unraveling, due in large part to the compelling testimony of key witnesses. Ordinarily, there is nothing unusual about compelling testimony changing the course of a trial, but in this case it is witnesses presented by the prosecution that are bolstering the case for the defendant. Thus, with each passing day it is becoming more apparent that the real reason for bringing this case to trial was to assuage the media-driven concerns of the racial grievance industry, led by chief arsonists Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Shamefully aiding and abetting them is the racially polarized Justice Department led by Attorney General Eric Holder.

We begin with the witnesses. Billed as the state’s “star witness,” 19-year-old Rachel Jeantel, the last person to talk to Trayvon Martin before his death, proved to be a major embarrassment. If there is a racial element to this case, other than the prosecution’s unsubstantiated accusation that Zimmerman “profiled” Martin, Jeantel introduced it during her testimony. She revealed that Trayvon Martin had referred to Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker,” even as she subsequently denied it was a racial term. Another compelling part of her testimony was in regard to a letter she had supposedly written to Martin’s mother describing the chain of events that led to Trayvon’s death. During questioning by defense attorney Don West, Jeantel was forced to admit that, despite signing it, she was incapable of reading the cursive script in which it was written.

West further grilled Jeantel about her inconsistent statements to police, and the discrepancies in her testimony. Jeantel blamed them on questions posed by law enforcement officials, and the lengths of the interviews. As to the omission of details, she claimed she was trying to spare the Martin family from enduring additional grief. In the end, Jeantel admitted she didn’t know who threw the first punch, and that she lied under oath. The former admission makes it virtually impossible for the prosecution to prove that Zimmerman didn’t fire in self-defense. The latter admission challenges Jeantel’s entire credibility.

Yet it was testimony from John Good, who witnessed the fight between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, that provided the most damaging, and perhaps fatal blow to the state’s case. Good testified that he saw Trayvon Martin on top of George Zimmerman, raining punches down on him Mixed Martial Arts style. Good further testified that the scream he heard must have come from Zimmerman, because he was on the bottom, and Martin was facing away from Good.

On Monday, detective Doris Singleton, who questioned Zimmerman the night of the shooting, became the latest prosecution witness to undermine the state’s case. She testified that Zimmerman asked her about the crucifix she wore on her neck, and buried his head in his hands after learning that Martin had died. During the exchange Singleton testified that Zimmerman said it was ”always wrong to kill.” ”I said to him, ‘If what you’re telling me is true then I don’t think that’s what God meant, you couldn’t save your own life,’” she said. Singleton further testified that Zimmerman was shocked when he learned that Martin was dead.

Audiotape of Singleton’s interview with Zimmerman was played in court. He explained he had joined the neighborhood watch after his home had been broken into. As to the fatal encounter with Martin, Zimmerman said Martin “jumped out” at him from the bushes and said, “What the f— is your problem, homey?” Zimmerman claimed he didn’t have a problem, and said Martin responded by saying, “Now you have a problem,” and punched him in the nose. When Zimmerman fell, Martin allegedly got on top of him, throwing punches. “He put his hands on my nose and said, ‘You’re going to die tonight,’” said Zimmerman on the tape. Zimmerman then stated that Martin saw his (Zimmerman’s) gun and started to reach for it, which is when Zimmerman drew it and shot the teenager.

Hirotaka Nakasone, an FBI audio voice analyst, further discredited the state’s case, saying he was unable to determine which of the two men was captured screaming on audio.

The state’s best witness was former lead investigator for the Sanford Police, Christopher Serino, who testified that Zimmerman’s injuries were “lacking” in terms of his story. He was further concerned that Zimmerman didn’t identify himself to Martin. Yet under cross-examination by defense attorney Mark O’Mara regarding Serino’s suggestion to Zimmerman that there might be a videotape of the incident, Serino admitted Zimmerman was buoyed by the possibility. ”I believe his words were, ‘thank god. I was hoping somebody would have videotaped it’,” said Serino. O’Mara then asked Serino what that response indicated to him. “Either he was telling the truth or he was a complete pathological liar,” the detective responded. The defense then asked Serino if pathological liar was removed from the equation, did he believe Zimmerman was being truthful. “Yes,” he testified.

Additional witnesses presented by the prosecution have, to date, corroborated Zimmerman’s version of the events in question, save one: Selma Mora testified last Thursday that Zimmerman was on top of Martin in the moments before a gunshot ended the fight, telling the court that a man wearing “patterns between black and red” was on top, meaning Zimmerman. ”One of them was on the ground, and the other one was on top in position like a rider,” the Spanish-speaking Mora testified through a translator. Yet unlike Good, Mora did not see the fight prior to the gunshot.

Again, these are witnesses for the prosecution, whose job is to prove that Zimmerman is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet it is more complicated than that. Because the state filed second degree murder charges against Zimmerman (as opposed to manslaughter, where they might have argued he acted without just cause), Florida law requires them to prove Zimmerman ”acted according to a ‘depraved mind’ without regard for human life.”

So why did the state pursue that charge? Because Trayvon Martin became a cause célèbre for race-hatred promoters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who called for marches and boycotts against the city of Sanford. Their efforts were aided and abetted by corrupt media, which bent over backwards to insert race into the equation. Those efforts included the New York Times referring to Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic,” NBC purposefully editing an audiotape of his 911 call to make Zimmerman appear racist, CNN claiming Zimmerman used the word “coon” when he actually said “cold,” and innumerable news outlets publishing a picture of Martin at age 13, despite the fact that he was 17 and over six feet tall at the time of the incident.

If a report by “sundance” at conservativetreehouse.com is accurate, the media’s effort to paint Zimmerman as racist was part of a well-coordinated publicity campaign undertaken by Martin family attorneys Benjamin Crump and Natalie Jackson, in conjunction with publicist Ryan Julison, who was instrumental in providing publicity for the Pigford Farmer’s lawsuit and settlement. “Within the prior networking connections to this lawsuit, and within the media consulting/advocacy, is where the outline of the Congressional Black Caucus and substantive race-dependent civil rights leaders such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the NAACP’s Ben Jealous are connected to Ryan Julison through Benjamin Crump and Natalie Jackson and the Pigford II Lawyer, Greg Francis,” he writes, further noting that their efforts were all about creating a “systematic campaign of optical control.”

Andrew McCarthy reveals the consequences of such a campaign with respect to the DOJ, citing the initiation of a “federal civil rights prosecution that induced state officials in Florida to reconsider the initial decision not to charge Zimmerman.” “It’s easy for a corrupt process to produce criminal charges,” writes McCarthy.

“It is quite something else to prove them. To try to fill the gaping intent hole in its case, the Zimmerman prosecution has transferred the hobgoblin of racism from the headlines into the courtroom. Indeed, it did not even wait for the trial to do that; the prosecutor injected racism directly into the charging documents.”

The Florida prosecutor did that by inserting the term “profiling” into the document which, McCarthy notes, was an effort “to imply, in the absence of any evidence, that Zimmerman is a bigot who assumed Martin was up to no good just because he was black.”

Yet it is PJMedia’s J. Christian Adams, a former attorney at the Justice Department, who reveals a disturbing reality regarding why the DOJ forced Florida’s hand. “Right now, hanging on the door of a federal employee’s office in the Department of Justice (DOJ) Voting Section is a sign expressing racial solidarity with Trayvon Martin,” Adams writes. He further notes that even as the DOJ abetted the mob demanding racial justice in Florida, it did absolutely nothing about New Black Panther leader Mikhail Muhammad, who put a $10,000 bounty on Zimmerman’s head and called for the mobilization of 10,000 black men to capture him.

In terms of making the case a national sensation, all of these efforts have been enormously successful, even as they remain mind-numbingly irresponsible — as well as substantially dangerous. If numerous comments posted on Twitter are any indication, the failure to convict Zimmerman of murder will precipitate large-scale rioting around the nation. In that regard, former Chicago police officer Paul Huebl adds fuel to an already burning fire. “With today’s social media I fully expect organized race rioting to begin in every major city to dwarf the Rodney King and the Martin Luther King riots of past decades,” he writes.

“If you live in a large city be prepared to evacuate or put up a fight to win. You will need firearms, fire suppression equipment along with lots of food and water. Police resources will be slow and outgunned everywhere.”

Philadelphia Tribune columnist Charles D. Ellison takes it one step further, insisting that the “pervasive cynicism currently surrounding the trial could be validated by an acquittal–and there is the risk of a flashpoint as intense as the aftermath of that fateful Los Angeles police brutality verdict in 1992.”

The message here is clear: either Zimmerman is found guilty, irrespective of the evidence, or the country will burn.

Barring a bombshell turn of events, the state will have a difficult, if not impossible, task proving that Zimmerman acted according to a depraved mind without regard for human life. The six female jurors and four alternates hearing the case have been sequestered and will remain so for the duration of the trial. Thus, it remains impossible to know if they are aware of the extra-judicial firestorm this case is engendering, and whether that firestorm will have any effect on their verdict.

Obviously, there is one man who could go a long way toward defusing this entire scenario should he choose to do so. President Barack Obama could rise above the fray and explain to every American that our system of justice means nothing if the threat of violence can corrupt the verdict of a murder trial. The President could make it clear that violent outbursts of any kind are absolutely unacceptable and attempt to defuse an already tense environment. He won’t, however, because race riots are good for the Democratic Party. They fire up the base. It’s what the whole show was for.

Logged

"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

WSJ: ObamaCare's 'Liar' SubsidiesThe White House says you can sign up 'without further verification.'

The White House seems to regard laws as mere suggestions, including the laws it helped to write. On the heels of last week's one-year suspension of the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate to offer insurance to workers, the Administration is now waiving a new batch of its own ObamaCare prescriptions.

These disclosures arrived inside a 606-page catch-all final rule that the Health and Human Services Department published on July 5—a classic Friday news dump, with extra credit for the holiday weekend. HHS now says it will no longer attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies and instead will rely on self-reporting, with minimal efforts to verify if the information consumers provide is accurate.

Remember "liar loans," the low- or no-documentation mortgages that took borrowers at their word without checking pay stubs or W-2s? ObamaCare is now on the same honor system, with taxpayers in tow.

People are supposed to receive subsidies only if their employer does not provide federally approved health benefits. Since HHS now won't require business to report those benefits or enforce the standards until 2015, it says it can't ask ObamaCare's "exchange" bureaucracies to certify who qualifies either.

HHS calls this "a slight technical correction" though it is much more than that. The exchanges will not only start dispensing benefits "based on an applicant's attestation" about his employment insurance status. HHS is also handing the exchanges "temporarily expanded discretion to accept an attestation of projected annual household income without further verification."

In other words, anyone can receive subsidies tied to income without judging the income they declare against the income data the Internal Revenue Service collects. This change has nothing to do with the employer mandate, even tangentially. HHS is disowning eligibility quality control because pre-clearance is "not feasible" as a result of "operational barriers" and "a large amount of systems development on both the state and federal side, which cannot occur in time for October 1, 2013."

You've got to love that passive voice. It's true that coordinating and managing vast amounts of information from hundreds of millions of Americans and corporations, and monitoring compliance with more than 10,000 pages of fine-print Federal Register regulations so far, is hard to do. Yet that is the system Democrats installed when they passed the law, which is not supposed to be optional due to administrative incompetence.

HHS promises to develop "a more robust verification process," some day, but the result starting in October may be millions of people getting subsidies who don't legally qualify. This would mean huge increases in ObamaCare spending. Some of these folks could be fraudsters, much as 21% to 25% of Earned Income Tax Credits flow to people who aren't eligible, according to the Treasury inspector general. The same error rate for ObamaCare would amount to as much as $250 billion in improper payments in its first decade.

The irony in the case of ObamaCare is that liberal health policy is predicated on the notion that if Congress commands something on paper, it will happen in the real world. Architects Peter Orszag and Ezekiel Emanuel are still claiming against all evidence that their policy experiments in human behavior modification will yield huge cost savings.

Yet now we are discovering that Democrats passed a bill that is so large and convoluted that even they can't implement it in practice. So don't be surprised if millions of individuals decide they're eligible for the subsidies, or should be, and wait for someone eventually to say they aren't.

Liberals are also now claiming that the employer mandate and these eligibility rules were never important parts of ObamaCare. This is revisionist history, not least because the mandate and eligibility limits helped reduce the cost as measured by the Congressional Budget Office.

The revisionism is also false because every provision of ObamaCare is supposed to "solve" a problem created by some other provision of the bill. Kick out one of the struts like the business mandate and the whole apparatus becomes even more unstable. In the case of the lawless decision to shelve any income or employer insurance scrutiny, HHS's logistical challenges are real. But our bet is that the Administration is also using them as a pretense in a deliberate bid to make it much easier to join the exchanges.

That's because the health planners are terrified that enough healthy, low-cost people won't sign up and therefore the Affordable Care Act's strict regulations on underwriting and risk-pooling will blow up insurance markets. As more and more of ObamaCare tumbles, the Administration is resorting to anything that can salvage the goal of permanently expanding the U.S. entitlement state.

All of this fits with ObamaCare's entire bloody-minded history. Democrats were determined to make their rendezvous with the liberal destiny of government-run health care, so they imposed this debacle on the country on a partisan vote and despite public opposition. Now that they are discovering how difficult it is to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy, they are rewriting the law as they go and telling Americans they have no choice but to live with the consequences.

Jonah yesterday, apropos ObamaCare and the postponement of the employer mandate, said we were now living under an “arbitrary system” in which “the political arm of the White House gets to decide what laws are going to be enforced and which ones aren’t“.

I made a similar point guest-hosting for Rush last Friday, noting that this was one of the indictments against George III in the Declaration of Independence:

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

When legislatures pass laws but the head of state decides which ones he’ll implement and which he won’t, that is a monarchy – and not a constitutional but an absolute one. When the English were as mad with James II as the Americans later were with George III, they spelled it out in the first charge of the 1689 Bill of Rights:

Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom;

By assuming and exercising a power of dispensing with and suspending of laws and the execution of laws without consent of Parliament;

President Obama has developed a habit of “dispensing with and suspending” all manner of laws from health care to immigration. If he gets to choose which laws he’ll enforce, do we get to choose which laws we follow?

Prosecutorial discretion poses an increasing threat to justice. The threat has in fact grown more severe to the point of becoming a due process issue. Two recent events have brought more attention to this problem. One involves the decision not to charge NBC anchor David Gregory with violating gun laws. In Washington D.C., brandishing a thirty-round magazine is illegal and can result in a yearlong sentence. Nonetheless, the prosecutor refused to charge Gregory despite stating that the on-air violation was clear.1 The other event involves the government’s rather enthusiastic efforts to prosecute Reddit founder Aaron Swartz for downloading academic journal articles from a closed database. Authorities prosecuted Swartz so vigorously that he committed suicide in the face of a potential fifty-year sentence.2

Both cases have aroused criticism. In Swartz’s case, a congresswoman has even proposed legislation designed to ensure that violating a website’s terms cannot be prosecuted as a crime.3 But the problem is much broader. Given the vast web of legislation and regulation that exists today, virtually any American bears the risk of being targeted for prosecution.

I. The Problem with Prosecutorial Discretion

Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson once commented: “If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows he can choose his defendants.”4 This method results in “[t]he most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”5 Prosecutors could easily fall prey to the temptation of “picking the man, and then searching the law books . . . to pin some offense on him.”6 In short, prosecutors’ discretion to charge—or not to charge—individuals with crimes is a tremendous power, amplified by the large number of laws on the books.

Prosecutors themselves understand just how much discretion they enjoy. As Tim Wu recounted in 2007, a popular game in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was to name a famous person—Mother Teresa, or John Lennon—and decide how he or she could be prosecuted:

It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you’d see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like “false statements” (a felony, up to five years), “obstructing the mails” (five years), or “false pretenses on the high seas” (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: “prison time.”7

With so many more federal laws and regulations than were present in Jackson’s day,8 a prosecutor’s task of first choosing a possible target and then pinning the crime on him or her has become much easier. If prosecutors were not motivated by politics, revenge, or other improper motives, the risk of improper prosecution would not be particularly severe. However, such motivations do, in fact, encourage prosecutors to pursue certain individuals, like the gadfly Aaron Swartz, while letting others off the hook—as in the case of Gregory, a popular newscaster generally supportive of the current administration.

This problem has been discussed at length in Gene Healy’s Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything9 and Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day.10 The upshot of both books is that the proliferation of federal criminal statutes and regulations has reached the point where virtually every citizen, knowingly or not (usually not) is potentially at risk for prosecution. That assertion is undoubtedly true, and the consequences are drastic and troubling.

The result of overcriminalization is that prosecutors no longer need to wait for obvious signs of a crime. Instead of finding Professor Plum dead in the conservatory and launching an investigation, authorities can instead start an investigation of Colonel Mustard as soon as someone has suggested he is a shady character. And since, as the game Wu describes illustrates, everyone is a criminal if prosecutors look hard enough, they are guaranteed to find something eventually.

Overcriminalization has thus left us in a peculiar place: Though people suspected of a crime have extensive due process rights in dealing with the police, and people charged with a crime have even more extensive due process rights in court, the actual decision of whether or not to charge a person with a crime is almost completely unconstrained. Yet, because of overcharging and plea bargains, the decision to prosecute is probably the single most important event in the chain of criminal procedure.

Indeed! This is a very good example of why it is a bad idea to have an omnipresent surveillance state.

However this does not negate the need for law enforcement or intelligence for national security. Now we have the worst of both worlds, a system focused on suppressing legitimate political viewpoints while studiously ignoring the jihadists in our midsts.

An excellent point, and one greatly augmented by an omnipresent surveillance state.

One that has been corrupted by a Chicago type thugocrat.

[Typing while GM posted, this makes essentially the same point.]

Yes. Increased distrust in government is about the only positive Obama accomplishment. Maybe out of that we can get IRS shrinkage, tax reform and scale back our overly zealous Census Bureau to its constitutional function. It may also be the downfall of Obamacare, I just can't yet see how. On the flip side, we may be losing security by losing our trust in the professionalism and independence of our security agencies.

"Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects."

"As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress 'would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.'"

Newly Released Documents Detail the Department of Justice’s Role in Organizing Trayvon Martin Protests

DOJ deployed obscure section to play role in Florida protests. Also read: Justice for Trayvon, Race-Hustler Style, by J. Christian Adams

byBryan Preston

Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained documents proving that the Department of Justice played a major behind-the-scenes role in organizing protests against George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is on trial for second-degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in February 2012.

Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the DOJ on April 24, 2012. According to the documents JW received, a little-known DOJ unit called the Community Relations Service deployed to Sanford, FL, to organize and manage rallies against Zimmerman.

Among JW’s findings: •March 25 – 27, 2012, CRS spent $674.14 upon being “deployed to Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.” •March 25 – 28, 2012, CRS spent $1,142.84 “in Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.” •March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent $892.55 in Sanford, FL “to provide support for protest deployment in Florida.” •March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent an additional $751.60 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31.” •April 3 – 12, 2012, CRS spent $1,307.40 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.” •April 11-12, 2012, CRS spent $552.35 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance for the preparation of possible marches and rallies related to the fatal shooting of a 17 year old African American male.” – expenses for employees to travel, eat, sleep?

JW says the documents it obtained reveal that CRS is not engaging in its stated mission of conducting “impartial mediation practices and conflict resolution,” but instead engaged on the side of the anti-Zimmerman protesters.

On April 15, 2012, during the height of the protests, the Orlando Sentinel reported, “They [the CRS] helped set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials that led to the temporary resignation of police Chief Bill Lee according to Turner Clayton, Seminole County chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” The paper quoted the Rev. Valarie Houston, pastor of Allen Chapel AME Church, a focal point for protestors, as saying “They were there for us,” after a March 20 meeting with CRS agents.

Separately, in response to a Florida Sunshine Law request to the City of Sanford, Judicial Watch also obtained an audio recording of a “community meeting” held at Second Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Sanford on April 19, 2012. The meeting, which led to the ouster of Sanford’s Police Chief Bill Lee, was scheduled after a group of college students calling themselves the “Dream Defenders” barricaded the entrance to the police department demanding Lee be fired. According to the Orlando Sentinel, DOJ employees with the CRS had arranged a 40-mile police escort for the students from Daytona Beach to Sanford.

“These documents detail the extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department in the pressure campaign leading to the prosecution of George Zimmerman,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “My guess is that most Americans would rightly object to taxpayers paying government employees to help organize racially-charged demonstrations.”

Organizing such protests falls well within both President Barack Obama’s and Attorney General Eric Holder’s wheelhouses. Obama was a “community organizer” in his career prior to elective politics, a position that uses protests and street theater, along with threats, to obtain concessions from businesses and other political opponents. Holder has accused America of being a “nation of cowards” for not discussing racial issues enough. He also described black Americans as “my people” during a congressional hearing.

As the Zimmerman trial winds down, the threat of race riots should he be acquitted has risen.

"Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects." "As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress 'would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.'"

Other examples of this were not enforcing borders, not building the fence, and not deporting. The justification is that Bush wouldn't do it either, or Clinton, etc.

I don't remember the campaign mantra that we will take the violations and abuse of our predecessor and build on them in ways you can't imagine.

"Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects." "As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress 'would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.'"

Other examples of this were not enforcing borders, not building the fence, and not deporting. The justification is that Bush wouldn't do it either, or Clinton, etc.

I don't remember the campaign mantra that we will take the violations and abuse of our predecessor and build on them in ways you can't imagine.

It was what he meant when he promised a "fundamental transformation of America".

The controversy over Internal Revenue Service targeting of politically active groups continues to deepen.

In the latest twist, congressional Democrats are stepping up their charge that the investigation so far has focused too much on conservative groups and ignored targeting of liberal and progressive groups.

Democrats, in a letter to Republicans, point to new evidence that progressive groups were being scrutinized. That includes a PowerPoint presentation from the Cincinnati office where the review occurred, and a newly discovered watch list. The new evidence suggests IRS workers in Cincinnati were actively scrutinizing liberal groups as well as conservative ones. The Cincinnati office reviews all applications for tax-exempt status.

The letter also cites newly uncovered evidence that the IRS targeting of tea party and other conservative groups for lengthy and heavy-handed review was not motivated by political bias in the Cincinnati office.

It’s not clear how much impact the new disclosures will have. The IRS inspector general who investigated the targeting has said all along that he found no evidence of political motivation in the Cincinnati office. Republicans are more focused on Washington higher ups who helped guide the scrutiny. But the new evidence of scrutinizing of liberal groups could raise doubts about whether conservative were singled out.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says in the new letter that the inspector general, Russell George, should have included the new evidence in his original report. Mr. George has said that there were watch lists mentioning liberal groups but they did not appear to be actively used. His office did not immediately comment on the letter Friday. Mr. Cummings wants committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) to call Mr. George to testify again.

“This investigation … has been characterized by one-sided and partial information leading to unsubstantiated accusations with no basis in fact,” Mr. Cummings says in the letter.